WhatsApp Will end Support for BlackBerry 10 and Symbian by the end of 2016

If you are still rocking a good old BlackBerry or a Symbian device, this is the time to dump them and push yourself to get a new smartphone. Not for any other reason, but that WhatsApp will no longer be supported officially. This means, while the app will continue to run, there will be no updates nor will the new features come in. WhatsApp has announced that it is pulling support, not just from all BlackBerry phones but also the good old Symbian S60 among other older platforms.

The decision comes after the market share percentages have plummeted for the older platforms thanks to the rise of Android and iOS. WhatsApp officially stated:

When we started WhatsApp in 2009, people’s use of mobile devices looked very different from today. The Apple App Store was only a few months old. About 70 percent of smartphones sold at the time had operating systems offered by BlackBerry and Nokia. Mobile operating systems offered by Google, Apple and Microsoft – which account for 99.5 percent of sales today – were on less than 25 percent of mobile devices sold at the time.

While these mobile devices have been an important part of our story, they don’t offer the kind of capabilities we need to expand our app’s features in the future.

This was a tough decision for us to make, but the right one in order to give people better ways to keep in touch with friends, family, and loved ones using WhatsApp. If you use one of these affected mobile devices, we recommend upgrading to a newer Android, iPhone, or Windows Phone before the end of 2016 to continue using WhatsApp.

Some of the other platforms that would be losing support includes S40, Windows Phone 7.1, Android 2.1 and Android 2.2

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